With Skyline EOL, where to next?

With VMware Skyline reaching end of life on October 4th, 2024, I am curious what options are available that take Skyline's place in the self-help & diagnostics space.

• Skyline's features are being rolled into VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).
  
• VMware recommends Skyline customers move to VCF or Aria Operations.
• Skyline Health Diagnostics (SHD) will continue to be supported.

Skyline was a free service, right? It seemed like it was a very basic way of allowing VMware support to have access to basic info about your systems, and in return gave you some information you could use to better manage your VMware assets. With Skyline gone, we can continue to use Skyline Health Diagnostics for free to help us turn our configs and logs into actionable information. But are VCF and/or Aria Operations free? or do they at least have a free tier? or are they at least included in your ESXi subscription? or does replacing Skyline mean spending more money than you had been spending? If so, are there non-VMware options for replacing Skyline? Maybe in Azure/365?